Poetry

Here, under these trees, under the weight of berries, poisonous unnamed, stars and husks of stars scattered, where shadows whisper in sunlight’s ear, press me down into bedevilment, green fingers sobbing over your back. Lift me over the sponged logs dotted with blood red lichens, my knees in your moss my knees in the moss of the woods around us. It is tight and furred as our breath in this hatch, this bed without arms. Taste the sky on my lips, needles like rue, thorns, slow chirrups, but no stones. Nothing harder than a plunge into soft wood, into a yielding mouse hole. Little bees start and shimmer in our gloss, ants crawl to lick the bruises, berries, off our skin. Even the air opens its mouth. Bird cries. Louder. Louder.

I · Diver Widewinged, goldeneyed, you never fear the depths as I do. Such measured freefall, the skill of each wingtip honed and preened over waves. Migration miles weigh each plunge. Gills and swim bladders consumed gather air and hold it deeper, deeper, until eelgrass and millfoil meadow. Perch flatten like mice under your shadow. Osprey, the lake bottom waits. By that I do not mean for your life, but for your hunger. It lounges, undulant, offering fins and bones and glass. And why do I worry? When you were five, you nearly drowned. I lost your hand in the waves. You surfaced shining. Wind fathered you. And now, you rise and dive without me, not blown, not carried, All navigation toward risk, wild and wide updrafts beckoning below. II · Augerer Darling, you are a wheatfield. Or no, oracle of the field. Hands indicate over the grain, a little scorching, a little blinding. You do not attend toward harvest, but aeromancy, reading the leaves. Each grain, your rune. Awn, glume, kernel. Bread rises under my rough knuckles but you choose nitrogen, loam, rain. And why do I worry? When you were three you wove flowers for a crown, raised them to your own head. Lightening. Sometimes the slim stalk lifting toward touch is all the revelation we need. No threshing, aspiration, enrichment. No yeast, honey, salted pinch. You raise a wide expanse of gold for hungry larks to feast in.

In this glaze, still wet, drag straight down. Create fine striations; practice to reach when standing. Formal, depending on colors. From foglight and sparrow to brass and bitter lemon. Paint bucket, rack brushes and roller string. Washer plumb. Liquid spirits. Linseed oil. Immediately submerge in water. Practice the thin extend but keep. With spirits or water. Dilute – get better. Work the brush to an entire wall in one session. The leading edge will be wet. Stir. Sticktray with liner. Curved step stool. Two house painter’s brushes, and rags. A midnight pulled horizontally, vertically, throws living into prominence. Caveat: technique requires at least one other person. Note the door, starting at the top corner. Layers of moss greentip just below. Ferrule. Extended arm. Press.

the pull toward and away, uniting and disassembling into something new, pronged and furred, feathery as an Iris, flesh and ether, orris root, the Io moth’s olfactory antennae, fluttering toward it’s mate like a blossom falling. It is the keen and the curve, the long trunk and the nest—downy, bristling, wet with night’s mysterious dew—in its fork. Pubis and spirit, flapping together. A spent flower drips purple, wetting your finger when you snap the wilted curl away from its cup of papery hush. The husk sticks, translucent breath held and let out, a wing of buff, cardinal’s mate, at the top of the stiff stem. And the remaining flowers: open mouths, sweet lines of pollen like tender teeth or furred tongues, raised and raspy as a cat’s caress, the union of voluptas and longing, taste and the offering of taste, pollen and polemics stroked with the same brush, the starling’s speckled back and the peacock’s. The flower yawns, postcoital, prenuptial, stretches and trembles. The sun shines through the deep purple membranes, stipples the veined petals, mapped and crosshatched as it unfurls from its sheath of leaf.